Seguimiento de trayectorias usando métodos numéricos

Performance Considerations

It is the hope that the information provided here will aid other conductors who may wish to perform this work. Discovery and Praises requires five soloists (Soprano I and II, Alto, Tenor, and Baritone), a chorus with a substantial men’s section, and an accomplished organist. The instrumentation is unusual requiring harp, flute, two percussionists and handbells. The soloists can be drawn from the choir if they are accomplished singers. The baritone solo stays consistently in the upper register and requires a certain degree of skill from the singer. The same can be said of the tenor solo. The range of the women’s soli lies in the middle to upper middle register. They are shorter in length than the tenor and baritone soli, but they also require a level of skill and projection that will allow these passages to be heard over the choir and instruments.

Each movement is through composed. A study of the score reveals the divisions that occur according to the changes of the text. Many of the sections are separated by instrumental interludes making the movements easy to divide into teaching units.

Because new material is presented, the transitions between sections can be challenging to learn. The individual sections can seem unrelated during the learning process.

The tessitura and the leaps in the disjunct melodies that are common throughout the piece require stamina and agility. The choir’s vocal production should be round, full, and well supported. Bright vowels allow the choir to be heard over the instruments. Except for the third movement, the texts are full of wonder and praise. The texts in the

first, second and fourth movements have a quality of childlike discovery of something new. Movement three, “The Defiance,” requires the tenors and basses to sing with a heavier sound production reflecting the angry mood of the text. The piece is best paired with other works of a spiritual or contemplative nature. Discovery and Praises is not conceived as a piece for liturgical use even though Susa calls it an Easter cantata. Church choirs who routinely sing advanced repertoire will find this piece satisfying in the context of a concert outside the regular worship experience. College choirs and community choruses will find this piece both challenging and rewarding to perform.

Summary

Conrad Susa’s music is accessible to performers and audiences with a wide range of musical knowledge. While his compositional style is based on traditional tonal

models, he uses non-traditional harmonic and melodic gestures. These elements combine to create choral pieces of great beauty with enough challenge to maintain the interest of seasoned performers. Susa’s pieces that have been published have gained popularity among choral conductors and performers. It is the hope of this study to facilitate awareness of Discovery and Praises and allow it to become a popular choice for choirs and audiences.

Discovery and Praises is a pastiche of influences and inspirations from works by Mahler, Webern, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. The first version of the work reflects the efforts of an emerging composer searching for his unique voice. Susa stated, “It served its purpose in sort of lifting me out of the bathtub of my childhood and dumping me in the

sandbox of life, but it never dried me off exactly.”31 _{The most recent version represents}

the work of a mature composer while keeping the core elements of the early composition. Susa puts his own voice into the piece especially in the instrumental accompaniment. The orchestration has evolved from full orchestra using strings to the addition of electric guitar in the 1970 revision and settling with the organ, harp, flute, percussion and

handbells in the 1986 revision. Discovery and Praises has not been published because Susa feels that the piece “never quite worked.”32 The composer may hold this opinion because he drew inspiration from other composers. While the influences are clear, musicians have borrowed from each other since ancient times. He uses thematic material as a point of embarkation, but he transforms the source material into music that is

uniquely Susa. The version from 1986 seems to be a cohesive unit in this author’s mind and in the mind of Gregory Colson, who commissioned the piece. The ancient texts juxtaposed with the musical influences from the last decade of the nineteenth century and various periods of the twentieth century combine to create a choral cantata that deserves more attention.

31 _{Susa, interview with the author.}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alcock, Joan P. Daily Life of the Pagan Celts. Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2009

Bieler, Ludwig. Studies on the Life and Legend of St. Patrick. London: Variorum Reprints, 1986.

Caedmon’s Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede: Six Essays, ed. by Allen J.

Frantzen and John Hines. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007.

The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. ed. Achsah Guibbory. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2006. “Conrad Susa,” Diapason. August 1965.

Crocker, Richard L. “Wipo (Wigbert).” Grove Music Online.

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.pallas2.tcl.sc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/mu sic/30429?q=wipo&search=quick&source=omo_gmo&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed March 7, 2012).

Freeman, Philip. St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Gaskin, Robert Tate. Caedmon: The First English Poet. New York: E. & J. B. Young, 1902.

Gurteen, Stephen Humphreys Villiers. The Epic of the Fall of Man: A Comparative

Study of Caedmon, Dante and Milton. New York: Haskell House, 1964.

Jackson, Gilbert Otis. The Choral Music of Conrad Susa. DMA research paper, Michigan State University, 1984.

Jeffers, Ron. Translations and Annotations of Choral Repertoire, Volume 1: Sacred Latin Texts. Corvallis, Oregon: Earthsongs, 1988.

Mahler, Gustav. Symphony No. 3, Movement 5, score, New York: Belwin Mills. Schoenberg, Arnold. A Survivor from Warsaw, score, 1947, rev. 1979, Vienna: Boelke-

Schlager, Patricius. “Wipo,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 15. New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1912. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15660a.htm (accessed March 7, 2012).

Slonimsky, Nicolas, Laura Kuhn, and Dennis McIntire, “Susa, Conrad,” Bakers

Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians. New York: Schirmer Books,

2001.

Stubbs, John. John Donne: The Reformed Soul. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007.

“Susa, Conrad,” Oxford Music Online

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.pallas2.tcl.sc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/mu sic/47033?q=Conrad+Susa&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed March 7, 2012).

Susa, Conrad. Discovery and Praises, score, 1986, Composer’s Facsimile Edition. Boston: ECS Publishing.

Targoff, Ramie. John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Webern, Anton. Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, score, 1909, http://www.imslp.org (accessed September 8, 2012).

APPENDIX A Interview with Conrad Susa

Recorded June 5, 2012

KEITH WALKER: I would like to begin with some general questions about Discovery and Praises. I know that the piece was composed originally in 1966, with a revision in 1970, and the final version being completed in 1986. Can you describe the differences among those three versions?

CONRAD SUSA: The work grew up in a very “higgledy-piggledy” kind of way. At that age when I started the work, I was very concerned that I had not written a large work. So I thought maybe a choral work would help where I would have a text at least to sort of get me going. I have a hard time being drawn to instrumental music for some reason. I don’t know why. When I do my theatre music, I don’t have any trouble at all, but when it comes to doing anything of my own, I prefer having a text to set. So I gathered a number of texts and settled on the idea of the Caedmon to start. I was pleased that it was the first known poem in English, and that makes it one of our earliest poems. I thought since this is my earliest big work, I will start with Caedmon. And then looking through my book, which was an anthology of poems, I came upon the Victimae Paschali Laudes

which I knew, and I thought well that’s a little further along by this time That poem was actually by a poet who was fourth century or something like that. Wipo, whoever Wipo was. I really like that poem. I always have since I was a little choirboy. I did a kind of

translation, which I think is better than the one they normally give. “Death and Life, their conflict have resolved,” seems to me a very clear statement of what happens. “Death and Life, the King of Death reigns living” or whatever it is. Then I decided it would be interesting to have an instrumental work in the middle of it, like the Mahler symphonies. They are sort of mish-mashes of instrumental and choral things. They are always built around a theme of some sort, and I was working in Mahlerian dimensions at that point. He was a big influence at the time. I put off what it was going to be. Then I realized that what I was struggling with was a sermon by St. Augustine called… basically it was about how we experience God without any sensations, how that’s done. And closing, I thought the St. Patrick was kind of jolly and nice. So I was going to write a Mahler symphony by me, and that is why there is so much Mahler in it. There is a lot of the Mahler Third in the Victimae Paschali, for example. I would say there is a lot of

Stravinsky’s … who went underground? She became the seasons, right on the tip of my tongue. [Demeter and Persephone]. Stravinsky wrote a beautiful work with narrator and ballet. The daughter of Ciries goes underground because she ate some of the seeds and becomes Pluto’s queen. I was interested in a seasonal explanation of birth and death as an aspect of the changing of the seasons and the growing of the plants. That also showed my interest in Joseph Campbell. Do you know Joseph Campbell?

KW: I don’t

CS: He is somebody you should look at. He is able to tie the myths of different countries and show their similarities. He shows Tibetan myths and Christian myths and show all are explainable in terms of the other. And also more miraculously in our dreams and this is your own. We frequently dream the same thing other people dream. And what a witch

doctor dreams, he dreams the dreams of his community. That is how he is able to lead it. A president, ideally, dreams the dreams of his country. It should enter into his dream life like those frightening dreams of Abraham Lincoln where he was on a rudderless ship. And it terrified him. He had that dream the night before he was assassinated. It was a repeating dream. Anyway, the dreams frequently contain answers to questions we did not ask. And so I wanted the work to be multi-faceted. It couldn’t be a Christian work with all that stuff going on even though St. Patrick appears at the end and blesses the world because he finds it jolly. This gave me a lot to do as a composer and I tried … now the great difficulty was to try and unify all these styles, which I never completely did. But I thought that the orchestration would do that. That didn’t work the first time. I orchestrated for the wrong ensemble, and that sort of happened the [second] time when we had sort of a rock orchestra. I thought well maybe it is something else. And that middle section proved to be the biggest problem because it was a narration over an organ background. It was the “discovery”. The other poems were all praises. And what the “discovery” was that God is some how in us. That was achieved by St. Augustine in one of his sermons. It’s a very interesting sermon, but it is incomprehensible. We had a radio announcer read it and no one understood a word of it. Greg [Colson] didn’t understand a word of it. I barely understood it, and I thought this isn’t going to go. How can you have a work try and explain something and have it be incomprehensible? So I yanked that and we’ll just not have it; so the work should technically just be called Praises. But there is something about “discovery” in the first poem where they discover the new world, “the world in its beauty,” and so forth. I thought, well, that will have to suffice; that very

slender little thread. My problem being that I was stuck with a title that was better than the work or at least as far as I felt.

The third revision involved taking a look at the texts again, deciding they were all right, finding new ways of unifying the music, and of extending the last piece so that it did not sound so much like the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, which it does anyway. Sort of, and yet it doesn’t. It does and it doesn’t, you know. It’s as if Stravinsky and I ate at the same table. But I didn’t have any more words. St. Patrick did not give me any more words. So, I just made up the last verses of that “keep us from harm and sudden death.” I found more things that the Lord would be useful for. I should have said things like high taxes; then, it would have turned into a revue of some sort. They were written quite purposely and without any strain. They came to me quite logically. You told me you liked those words in particular. I thought they were logical from the point of view of where the poem was going. “Protect me from things that do me harm; I want to die and wake in the city beside you.” That seemed to be a very nice image. So that’s how the poem went. I did the final version without hearing it until Greg did it on the California Tour [Georgia Tech Chorale, 1990]. That was quite a nice performance of it.

Typically, Greg commissions a particular orchestration: dah dah dah plus harp. So the very next thing that happens is he calls me, he says, “Conrad, I can’t find a harp anywhere. Is it alright if I substitute a piano?” I said, “NO! You picked a G**damn harp. I didn’t.” He says, “Well, what about the tour? If I go on a tour, I can’t afford a harp.” I said, “If you can’t afford a harp, don’t tell me about it. I will never give you permission to substitute anything for the harp because that is what I wrote it for, but if

you have to take something else, don’t tell me because you won’t get it! You picked the harp. I didn’t.”

KW: And I seem to remember that he found a harpist in each of the cities where we performed.

CS: Oh, I am sure he did. That is basically the story of that work. I did keep writing until I thought it was finished.

KW: The 1970 version of it. I have come across some information that there was a performance of it at Duke [University] with Benjamin Smith conducting, I believe. Can you tell me anything about that performance?

CS: I have a very hazy picture of that. Benjamin Smith was somebody I had always wanted to meet. He was a good friend of Greg’s, and Greg said, “Wait till you meet Ben.” I hated him. I was just chemically so turned off by him, and by everything he did, and by all his ideas about everything. I felt…somebody phonier than Greg. Greg seems like the soul of honesty compared to this guy. And I think that is one of the reasons Greg liked him, because they had sort of Clintonesque oil going between them. He was

perceived to be a good musician, don’t get me wrong, but I just couldn’t stand him. And then we wanted to do this version and include an electric guitar and we flew that man down from Connecticut. He played very well. We had a radio announcer do the St. Augustine sermon over the music, and that poor soul was so far off. He couldn’t read the back of a recipe box. [Speaking in a monotone] “He spoke like this, and then this

happened, and then there was this [upward inflection], and then it rained, and we’re getting better weather…” I just about died. I felt sorry for him because he really didn’t want to do it. We both convinced him he could. I was wrong. [Inaudible] That was the

most radical production in a way of the productions. I came to realize that it was not going to be a rock piece with a sacred text. It was the height of those kinds of things. My work was an un-happening, I suppose.

KW: The John Donne poem that is the third movement. CS: Oh, yes. I forgot about that.

KW: What drew you to that particular poem?

CS: I had always liked that poem. That’s a tremendous poem. It’s the greatest piece of literature in the work, and I thought this poem doesn’t need me, but I’d love to set it. It doesn’t need to be set to music at all, and actually it took a lot of guts for me to set it. It’s also the most Mahlerian of the settings. It has some Webern, some quotations from the Six Orchestra pieces. I thought that was another style of mine that I could write in, but I didn’t go that way. There I was trying to write a work, and all these different styles, they were all genuine. I could have any of those roads. Of course, the question is which road would it be? It had to be something finally that was based on my honesty with myself, not my attempt to make an effect in music or do what some great master did or anything